Tiziana on Sat, 2 Feb 2002 22:57:54 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> The degree zero of politics: virtual cultures/virtual socialmovements. Part 1 |
Hi this is the transcript of a talk that I gave last week at a media research seminar at the LSE (of all places...). I would welcome any comments and feedback of course. best tiziana terranova The degree zero of politics: virtual cultures and virtual social movements. Good evening and thanks for coming to this presentation. The paper I will be reading tonight is a short extract from a book I am completing for Pluto Press provisionally entitled Network culture: the cultural politics of cybernetic communications. More specifically, the paper is loosely based on the last chapter of the book, which discusses the emergence of network-organised forms of political protests. An earlier version of this chapter was published in Virtual Globalisation, a collection of essays edited by David Holmes for the Routledge Advances in Sociology series. There are a few things that I should mention in order to explain the specific focus of this paper. A substantial part of the research material at the basis of the book is Internet-derived. In particular, I have used mailing lists as an entry point, and specifically a group of mailing lists that has historically been crucial to the Œinternal¹ debate on the cultural politics of cybernetic communications. The main lists I followed are nettime and syndicate , but I have also hopped in and out of several other lists, some of them short lived, some more enduring. What these lists have in common is that they are specifically concerned with the cultural and political uses of the medium. I am interested in how cybernetic communications in a networked mode has been conceptualised and debated in some of these clusters of communication, these mailing lists, but also websites and other printed publications that are specifically concerned with the cultural politics of cybernetic communications. Mainly, however, I have chosen, mailing lists as an entry-point. I think that mailing lists are crucial constituent moments within the development of virtual social movements. Within mailing lists the generalised connectivity that opposes the users to the magmatic abundance of Internet material starts acquiring a certain type of organisation, although, as appropriate to a 'space of flows', a fluid one. Mailing lists organise the use (the actualisation) of Internet material by coupling the circulation of information with the circulation of interpretation and evaluation . They are one of the most powerful ways through which the confusing, dizzying abundance of information and data on the Internet is organised and filtered to singular Internet users. A brief description might contribute to clarify the issue. Mailing lists, of which exist different types on the Internet, are inherently temporary: they might run for a long time, but the decision to stop them can be taken at any time. They are usually focused on specific topics, accepting subscribers either on a limited or unlimited basis. Mailing lists might go through very active phases and then die out; or be regular, limited updates streaming through one¹s e-mail account; they might be moderated or unmoderated; mainly dedicated to spread information or to discuss specific topics; local, national or global. Crossposting across mailing lists is common, so that a network of messages and communication runs continuously among different users, changing according to the time and topicality. For example the cross-posting between American and Western European lists with Eastern Europe increased exponentially during the Kosovo War creating what McKenzie Wark has called "a new web of witnessing" , but many of the more politicised mailing lists are consistently crossed by messages from South America or the Far East. Mailing lists are also important, alternative search engines, directing participants towards selected web-sites for in-depth reports or video- and audio-streaming in the occasion of specific events. Those participants who are more actively involved might supplement their online conversations by meeting face-to-face in regular or occasional meetings; or use mobile or fixed telephony to set up meetings or organise demonstrations. Participants to these exchanges might be individuals who are relatively disconnected from the majority of the other subscribers or might move within physical networks where regular face-to-face contact cements a group belonging. That is they might or might not belong to local or global groups; they might feed information or mostly just absorb it; they might be organisers of specific events or only occasional participants. However, mailing lists should not be seen in isolation but as part of a larger matrix of communication that includes the use of web-sites, mobile telephones, audio and video-streaming, tapes, leafleting, publishing and so on. . Mailing lists present virtual social movements with the possibility to continuously formulate and reformulate the types of problems they wish to address on the basis of collectively produced information. They connect individuals and groups to each other but also disconnect them from the totality of Internet users in order to focus on specific issues. They introduce users to a variety of opinions and information whilst also filtering and re-arranging for them the chaotic abundance of available information on the Internet. What is the status of this online material in the context of my research? One thing I am concerned not to do is to look at the results of this work of monitoring, reading and participating simply in terms of Œdiscursive constructions¹. The notion of discourse, in fact, as it has become widely used within some sectors of cultural studies, implies that reality is constructed by and through language. Language is understood as a signifying system, or a system of signs, that divides and orders the world of objects for human understanding and activity. From this perspective, then, all linguistic expression is a mediation that constructs different types of reality. It could appear to some, then, as the best obvious strategy to deal with this material. However, I have chosen to use this material in a different way, not as a representation but as the production of a cultural and political practice which is not limited to the reproduction of signs. This is part of an effort throughout the book to produce a non-representational and non-representative analysis of the Internet. This rejection of a representational method of cultural analysis does not aim to produce an unmediated truth on Internet cultures. On the contrary it is about the conscious choice of looking at Internet debates at the level of a specific cultural and political engagement with the medium, the types of communication that it enables and its relationship with the larger cultural context of late capitalist societies. In this sense, I am interested in how the Internet materialises what Pierre Levy has described as a 'collective intelligence' and Paolo Virno, following Marx a 'general intellect', a collective assemblage of bodies and machines where connectivity implies the release of a surplus value of potential. What I aim to do in the book is to follow the features of these practices and engage with them at a conceptual level, relating them to issues debated in cultural and media studies. This means that within this paper I will not attempt an all-encompassing analysis of contemporary networked social movements. I will rather concentrate on those parts of these cultural and political practices that seem to be concerned more specifically with the media and their role in the constitution of different types of political cultures. OLD MEDIA/NEW MEDIA I will start with mainstream media, and television, then. In discussions about the potential of the Internet for a new type of cultural politics and new types of political participation, I have found an insistent and virulent rejection of the world of mainstream media, and in particular of television. This rejection of television spans even the ideological barriers that still oppose different groups with different types of investment in the medium. In 1994, Howard Rheingold articulated this rejection clearly in his bestseller The Virtual Community, denouncing the "commercial mass media, led by broadcast television, [who] have polluted with barrages of flashy, phony, often violent imagery a public sphere that once included a large component of reading, writing, and rational discourse." These sentiments were widely shared among early net-pioneers who thought about the Internet as the anti-television, a medium potentially capable of establishing a true realm of communicative action free from corporate control and the mediation of established entertainment conglomerates. This point was also reiterated with a strong note of caution by the droves of media activists that quite early on, latched on to the political potential of the new medium. Media activists have always been very wary of the easy enthusiasm of early Internet debate, in as much as they bore the scars of the limited impact of cable TV, another participatory medium at whose door many hopes had been laid in the eighties. The postings of these veterans of the media wars are full of warnings about the capacity of capitalist culture to absorb dissent and recuperate within itself new technological and cultural spaces. Their comments can often be heard on these mailing lists, recapitulating for younger users the disillusionment with the notion that a medium is inherently revolutionary or that political struggle can be conducted simply through the production of signs of dissent. Still, in spite of their reservations, they too insist on the centrality of computer-mediated communication in relation to new forms of social struggle. Whatever their level of enthusiasm for the new medium, a strong opposition to mainstream media is common among networked activists. The opposition is especially foregrounded at every instance of mass mobilisation. In this sense, the antagonism between Œold media¹ and Œnew media¹ is not simply a discursive device that is meant to mark a break and provide the new with an identity. On the contrary, networked social movements live the interface with mainstream media as a confrontation between two incompatible modes of communication. In this sense, the encounter between the Net and the Set manifests itself again and again as a conflict between two different types of cultural forces, the culture of representation and the spectacle and the culture of participation and virtuality. As I mentioned before, this dynamic becomes very evident during the moments of mass political protests, more recently during the series of demonstrations that took place all around the globe between 1999 and 2001. I observed more closely in particular the protests of Seattle and those of Genoa. It is not by chance than in both cases it was the Indymedia movement of independent news reporting that came to the fore. The Indymedia movement is an attempt to establish an Œopen¹ and Œdirect¹ way of reporting news. It was started in Seattle at the end 1999 as an alternative to what was perceived as the biased coverage of mainstream media. The indymedia movement has grown in the last two years, with more sites springing up in location other than the United States. During the days of the protest, both the indymedia sites and the mailing lists were filled with accusations against the capacity of television and the mainstream press to obliterate both the real issues of police brutality and the larger context for the protests. On the other side, even potentially sympathetic mainstream media, such as The Guardian or Channel 4 in Britain, were puzzled. What kind of movement was a movement with no signs and no consensus? This relationship of Œincommunicabiliy¹ between these two types of media culture should not be seen as an indisputable fact. I am not claiming here, although this claim can be found in a large number of postings, that mainstream media, and especially television, can be limited to their function of ideological state apparatuses or/even to that of producers of interchangeable signs of reality. Personally I think that the hostility of virtual social movements to television is justified by the latter¹s coverage of the events, but I do not think that this coverage exhausts the potential of television itself. In a way, the original mass media have played an important part in engendering the cultural and social affinities between different groups that enable us today to have such movements at all (from the spectacle of Tien Na Men to the global youth cultures of MTV). That is virtual social movements would not exist without the process of cultural globalisation to which media such as television have been crucial. I am more interested, then, in how this hostility is related more than to the medium of television itself to a larger rejection of Œspectacular¹ and Œrepresentative¹ politics, and a return to a Œdegree zero¹ in relation to the question: where does power (puissance or posse) come from? And how should power, defined as the expression of a collective will from below, be expressed as a political/cultural practice? In this sense, the puzzlement of TV journalists at a 'movement with no signs¹ is an acknowledgment of this cultural and political divergence. Should politics be about the rational debate between a limited multiplicity of clearly articulated perspectives that confront each other in the nominally Œneutral¹ public sphere which television (ideally) sets itself up to be? Or should politics be about the emergence of singularised and yet collective levels of engagement with practice, taking place below and above the level of representative, mediated communication (between electors and MPs or between audiences and producers)? In this sense, then, this rejection can also be seen as a rejection of a whole notion of Œcounter-hegemonic¹ politics, that is the notion that a coalition of social classes should be able to find its identity under the sign of a single or hegemonic signifier. Thus if some posters join mainstream media in accusing the movement of its incapacity to produce a coherent position that can be unequivocally conveyed through the powerful megaphone of mainstream media, others reject the notion that such a unity is needed or justified. Problems of definition and labelling in fact haunt these debates in many ways. Calls for political unity under a single signifier are regularly opposed by those claiming that this unrepresentable diversity is the strength of such movements. The political content of networked social movements, then, should be found not only in the specific proposals that are put forwards, but also in (as Nik put it in one of his postings) "the endless wealth of examples of "theory-in-practice", that is the autonomous, anti-hierarchical, and networked protest affinity groups ‹ from their decision making structures to the carnival they introduce into the protests and revolutionary actions." Nik concludes, in a tone that should be familiar to us by now: " There is a difference between having alternatives and having the mass of status quo media acknowledge them." The alternatives, then, are identified not only with 'concrete proposals¹, but also with the mode of communication and organisation itself, as it spills in and out of the actual use of network technologies as such. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net